Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Characteristics in Music

not for compatibility. mp3 is ubiquitous. my 2017 VW can play mp3 and even flac from an sd card. i doubt it even knows what opus is.

i think you'd be hard pressed to tell a difference between a well-encoded (flac source) 192kbps vbr mp3 and 160 kbps opus. the file size of the latter will be 30% smaller.

> What software do you use to listen to music on your computers?

on windows, foobar2000. it's superb, no bs and has tons of optional plugins.

The higher bitrates (above 128) aren't so advantageous.

https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings (Dec. 2018)

He had twenty records. Ten of them were test signals.

In audio production you can really feel the difference between 16 bit Audio and 24 bit. Just like in photography were RAW only really makes a difference when you start to manipulate the data you really start to hear the difference between 16 and 24 bit once you work with recordings.

24 Bit allows more “shades” of loudness between the loidest signal and absolute silence. This means the above statements depend on the dynamic range of the recording, which is arguably too low in these days.

As an output format 16bit should be enough for most scenarios and except for a few edge cases hearing the difference of a well mastered 16bit recording to the same thing in 24 bit should be nearly impossible.

This however refers all to uncompressed audio. Depending on your audio gear you can definitly can hear a difference between uncompressed/lossless and lossy mp3 compression even at 320kbps. The same is true for 330kbps vs 128kbps mp3.

I must admit that I cannot differenciate between uncompressed and opus 256kbps.

If you do anything that needs audio compression I strongly recommend looking at the Opus Codec

This is something I wonder about, too, but by my limited knowledge of signal processing the low pass effects of the signal transmission path do simply not admit any such frequencies. I wonder whether that counts for all orders of derivation, though.

I wonder if higher frequencies can cause resonance in lower frequencies, undertones instead of overtones so to speak, maybe in exotic geometries like the inner ear. Echo location famously works better in the ultrasonic range and involves higher order derivatives. We don't talk of constant sinusoids, but ultrasonic sweeps and chirps (not sparkle :D). We can't hear ultrasound, but perhaps we can sense it similarly to how we can sense lowest frequencies as rumble.

I really don't know the maths, what is a really low frequency note played for nanoseconds? High frequency Pulse Width Modulation is used to modulate sound in the audible range, which is quite tricky to get right mathematically and in hardware. The common problem is the introduction of ringing, indeed.

By the way, I really like to listen to music under the shower in the next room. I hear, or rather hallucinate, the most wonderful sounds under the noise.

Chances are my soundblaster soundcard does not support either of those.

Similarly, you can't just diff two different recording of two different sample rates without conversion, so the conversion would either introduce artifacts if upsampling (and if it wouldn't, you wouldn't hear a difference) or render any advantage obsolete if downsampling the high sample rate. Obviously depends on the algorithm used, but you should target whatever your soundcard supports.

Or you mean why reencode later from lossless again, if a better codec appears? If it will be better, it will offer some benefits (smaller size, faster decoding and so on). So why not?